The U.S. has lost track of some of Syria’s chemical weapons, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday, and does not know if any potentially lethal chemicals have fallen into the hands of Syrian rebels or Iranian forces inside the country.

“There has been intelligence that there have been some moves that have taken place. Where exactly that’s taken place, we don’t know.” Panetta said, in a Pentagon press briefing.

(CNSNews.com) - Speaking to a group of foreign ministers from Arab nations at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed support for loosening regulations, particularly on small businesses, because “too many people still can’t find jobs”--in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

In Libya, according to an estimate published in May by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development [OECD], real Gross Domestic Product is expected to grow this year at a rate of 20.1 percent—or about 15 times the 1.3 percent annualized rate at which real GDP grew in the United States in the second quarter of this year. The OECD further estimated that Libya’s real GDP would grow by another 9.5 percent next year.

Register | Log inMORE ON THIS STORYStory | Syria’s rebel groups united only by opposition to Bashar AssadStory | Despite focus on cities, Syria’s civil war grinds on in countrysideStory | In Syria’s largest city, rebellion takes on an overtly religious toneStory | Syria’s rebels counting on captured anti-aircraft guns to defeat air forceStory | Syria rebels say they killed leader of extremist group that kidnapped 2 journalistsStory | Analysts: Syrian army in no danger of collapsing from rebel assaultsGraphic | More refugees flee SyriaOn the Web | More Middle East coverage from McClatchyBy Hannah Allam | McClatchy NewspapersNEW YORK — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday announced $45 million in additional aid for Syrian opposition activists, the latest U.S. push for influence in a civil war that’s raged beyond the international community’s control.

Clinton announced the new aid package before meeting with visiting Syrian dissidents on the margins of this week’s U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders sounded bleaker than ever about the prospects for a negotiated political resolution to the 18-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. humanitarian aid for Syria now will total more than $132 million this year, though Syrian rebels are more interested in weapons and military training than in the American promises of more “nonlethal assistance.” Of the $45 million pledged Friday, $30 million is earmarked for humanitarian assistance and $15 million for radios, training and other technical support for opposition activists.

The U.S. government has refused to directly arm or fund the so-called Free Syrian Army, a loose confederation of rebel militias, largely out of fear that the assistance would make its way to Islamist extremist groups that have joined the battle to unseat Assad.

U.S. policy is in a “really tough spot,” said Joseph Holliday, a Washington-based researcher at the Institute for the Study of War who specializes in the Syrian conflict. While the administration’s instincts to withhold direct aid from rebel fighters is understandable, he said, that strategy is backfiring.

“The irony of our fear of supplying Islamist groups is that the others who are arming the opposition – the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks – are doing just that, providing weapons and ammunition to Islamists,” Holliday said. “Our lack of giving support is actually leading to the Islamicization of the opposition.”

Despite the resignation at the U.N. now to a drawn-out, increasingly bloody conflict, the Obama administration remains focused on courting remnants of the peaceful protest movement, whom analysts say don’t enjoy the same street credibility as the armed opposition forces confronting Assad’s military.

The United States is helping to train and organize nonviolent actors in hopes they’ll take the lead in an eventual post-Assad transition, though deep ideological and other divisions have so far prevented the Syrian activists from coalescing into a government-in-waiting, such as the one Libyans formed in the months before the fall of strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Analysts describe the U.S. gamble on one segment of the opposition as part of a continued lack of U.S. strategy for Syria that’s left the administration with no real inroads to either the Assad regime or the rebel militias – the two sides to the civil war that’s already spilling beyond Syria’s borders.

Only recently, analysts say, did the government back off from the Syrian National Council, a collection of exiles and technocrats the U.S. government had tried in vain to whip into a viable transitional body.

“For a long time, we’d said they needed to move past the SNC because they were not the answer. Now they’re trying to identify credible opposition groups that are active on the ground,” Holliday said.

The State Department’s new focus is on more grassroots activists, such as members of municipal and provincial revolutionary councils. In a preview briefing before Friday’s meeting, a senior State Department official told journalists that the opposition delegation would include activists who run field hospitals and supply bakeries.

Providing those kinds of basic services to civilians trapped in open-ended warfare will give the unarmed opposition “a leg up when ultimately the regime goes and is replaced by something else,” said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity per diplomatic protocol.

“People with guns who don’t know how to have bread baked are quickly going to lose credibility on the street. People with guns who can’t make the lights come back on are going to quickly lose credibility on the street,” the official said.

However, the meeting with the nonviolent activists doesn’t seem to have gone smoothly. After journalists were cleared out, Syrian delegates were each given three minutes to describe the conditions on the ground in Syria and to make requests or recommendations to Clinton and the other high-ranking diplomats.

After that, delegates said, they were summarily asked to leave so that Clinton could speak privately to the assembled foreign ministers – a surprise move that offended the delegates, including some who’d made risky trips out of the war zone for what amounted to a few minutes of face time with the leaders.

The disgruntled Syrians filed out, complaining that the State Department had handpicked the delegation, had excluded them from talks with the foreign ministers, and had failed to move policy to more direct military aid for their cause. Even France and Turkey, delegates said, had become more vocal in calling for humanitarian intervention such as imposing a no-fly zone or creating a safe corridor.

“Unfortunately, expectations are low after this meeting because there’s no shift in the U.S. position on Syria,” said Syrian delegate Radwan Ziadeh, spokesman for the opposition Coalition for a Democratic Syria. “Unfortunately, the White House is waiting until after the (U.S. presidential) election before touching this. We ask for support and training for the Free Syrian Army and they tell us, blah blah blah, nonlethal assistance.”

This is unbelievable. The Obama Administration blamed the “friendly fire” attacks in Afghanistan on US troops.

U.S. Army specialist Mabry Anders (L), who was killed in an attack by an Afghan army soldier in Afghanistan on August 27, 2012, is pictured with his mother Genevieve Woydziak (C) and his stepfather Troy Woydziak in this undated handout family photo obtained by Reuters September 26, 2012. The “insider attack” also took the life of another U.S. soldier, Sergeant Christopher Birdwell. (REUTERS/Anders Family)

The New York Post reported, via Pat Dollard:

Afghan security forces, our supposed allies, are slaughtering American troops. Thirty-three soldiers have been killed by “green on blue” attacks this year alone. The situation is so bad that the training of Afghan forces has been temporarily suspended.

How has the Pentagon responded?

By blaming our troops.

Top officials believe culturally offensive behavior is the motivation behind the killings, so it’s stepped up Islamic sensitivity training for our troops.

It is indeed going to hell, because fewer and fewer Americans seem to grasp its value. "Anti-Islam film sparks protest in Jakarta: Some 5,000 Muslims march through the Indonesian capital to U.S. embassy," from The Associated Press, October 1 (thanks to Kenneth):

Thousands of Muslims enraged over an anti-Islam film have marched through Indonesia's capital....

It was previously noted that, despite billions in aid over the years, Sudan turned down an Obama administration request to deploy 50 Marines to protect Americans serving at the American Embassy in Sudan. It was subsequently reported that the State Department withdrew non-essential personnel given the refusal.

Now, the Sudan Tribune is reporting it as having been an Obama administration demand, one important enough to require the involvement of Vice President Biden, who was also rebuffed by the Sudanese government.

It appears as though Sudan is intent on humiliating the Obama administration by reporting the controversy as they do.

Following a violent protest in Friday over an anti Islam film Washington demanded the Sudanese government to allow a special force to protect its diplomatic mission in Khartoum. US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told Foreign Policy magazine that the Pentagon has to be ready to deal with situations where the protests against the American embassies in the host countries “get out of control”. Also another official said that the Pentagon was discussing whether to send a platoon of 50 anti-terrorism Marines to Khartoum, but a asserted that no decision has been taken yet. However the official SUNA on Saturday reported that the Sudanese government received such demand from the State Department and rejected the American demand.

Foreign minister Ali Karti received a call from an assistant to the U. S. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton who expressed the desire of the American Administration to dispatch a special force to protect its embassy in Khartoum following the protests in the Islamic world. Karti “has declined to authorise the deployment of these forces affirming Sudan’s ability to protect foreign diplomatic missions in Khartoum and reiterated the State’s obligation to protect its guests members of diplomatic missions,” the official news agency said.

On the other hand the semi-official SMC news service said that Khartoum’s security coordination committee decided Saturday to tighten security measures and protection of embassies, diplomatic missions, and foreign officials to avoid their exposure to any risk. In Washington the State Department announced that non-essential staff was ordered to leave the its embassies in Tunisia and Sudan.

“Given the security situation in Tunis and Khartoum, the U.S. State Department has ordered the departure of all family members and non-emergency personnel from both posts, and issued parallel travel warnings to American citizens,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement.

Nuland on Friday evening told reporters that Vice-President Joe Biden spoke with Sudanese Frist Vice President Ali Osman Taha about the deployment of Marines in Khartoum. She also said Thomas R. Nides, Deputy State Department Secretary called a senior Sudanese official for the same purpose.

She also denied that Marines engage protestors in Khartoum pointing out that the Sudanese security forces pushed back demonstrations, including three protestors who managed to get on top of the perimeter wall of the embassy.

The US embassy in Sudan on Saturday issued an emergency message to the American citizens in Khartoum informing them that the embassy is closed until further notice and advise them to stay away and avoid coming to the embassy “for any reason”.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan covers the reaction in Cairo's Tahrir Square the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February 2011. | CBS News photo

Updated: October 8, 2012 2:18AM

This was no ordinary rubber chicken affair. That was my reaction to the extraordinary keynoter at Tuesday’s Better Government Association annual luncheon.

Lara Logan, a correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” delivered a provocative speech to about 1,100 influentials from government, politics, media, and the legal and corporate arenas. Such downtown gatherings are a regular on Chicago’s networking circuit. (I am a member of the BGA’s Civic Leadership Committee, and the Chicago Sun-Times was a sponsor).

Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

As a journalist, I was queasy. Reporters should tell the story, not be the story. As an American, I was frightened.

Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

In the “good old days,” reporters did not advocate, crusade or call for revenge.

In these “new” days in a post-9/11 world, perhaps we need more reporters who are willing to break the rules.

Even as bumper sticker slogans go, it was a bit dubious from the start. Now it looks like it was actually the other way around.

The claim seemed bogus from the moment the angry mob in Cairo chanted “Obama! Obama! There are still a billion Osamas!” right up through this month’s resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq.

And as far as GM goes, it appears that rumors of its survival may have been exaggerated as well. Despite life support efforts that included the removal of crushing debt from its books and infusions of billions in special future tax breaks, GM managed to lose one-third of its value in less than 2 years. And now it’s official: GM really hasn’t made a car in the past 20 years that hasn’t been recalled!

GM wouldn’t exist today butt for a U.S. government bailout; apparently the same can be said of al Qaeda in Iraq. Maybe we should stop bailing out losers at home as well in the Middle East. And here’s another idea: how about we focus on taking guns away from al Qaeda instead of U.S. citizens?